Saturday, September 06, 2014

NYTimes |Pope Francis
grabbed headlines recently when he announced that Rome had lifted the
block on sainthood for Archbishop Óscar Romero of San Salvador, who was
shot dead while saying Mass in 1980. But much less attention was given
to another of the pope’s actions, one that underscores a significant
shift inside the Vatican under the first Latin American pope in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.

Archbishop
Romero was assassinated after speaking out in favor of the poor during
an era when right-wing death squads stalked El Salvador under an
American-backed, military-led government in the 1970s and ’80s. For
three decades Rome blocked his path to sainthood for fear that it would
give succor to the proponents of liberation theology, the revolutionary
movement that insists that the Catholic Church should work to bring
economic and social — as well as spiritual — liberation to the poor.

Under
Pope Francis that obstacle has been removed. The pope now says it is
important that Archbishop Romero’s beatification — the precursor to
becoming a saint — “be done quickly.” Conservative Catholics have tried
to minimize the political significance of the pope’s stance by asserting
that the archbishop, though a champion of the poor, never fully
embraced liberation theology.

But
another move by Pope Francis undermines such revisionism. This month he
also lifted a ban from saying Mass imposed nearly 30 years ago upon
Rev. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, who had been suspended as a priest for
serving as foreign minister in Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista
government in the same era. There is no ambiguity about the position on
liberation theology of Father d’Escoto, who once called President Ronald
Reagan a “butcher” and an “international outlaw.” Later, as president
of the United Nations General Assembly, Father d’Escoto condemned
American “acts of aggression” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But
there is more to the pope’s action than kindness to an 81-year-old man.
In a remarkable turnaround, liberation theology is being brought in
from the cold. During the Cold War, the idea that the Catholic Church
should give “a preferential option for the poor” was seen by many in
Rome as thinly disguised Marxism. Pope John Paul II, who had been
brought up under Soviet bloc totalitarianism, was determined to crack
down on it. On a visit to Nicaragua, he famously wagged a finger at
Father d’Escoto’s fellow priest and cabinet minister, Ernesto Cardinal.
The Vatican also silenced key exponents of liberation theology, and its
founding father, the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, was placed under
investigation by the Vatican’s guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy, the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or C.D.F.